This document set is written to meet the requirements of information technology (IT) professionals who are responsible for the planning, design, deployment, and operations of backup and recovery solutions in enterprise, corporate, or branch office environments. The readers of this document set are expected to have an understanding of its technical details. However, service-level expertise is not needed to follow the enterprise-level discussions and to understand the decisions that are made.

A backup is a copy of data that is used to restore and recover that data after a system failure. Backups allow you to restore data after a failure. With proper backups, you can recover from many failures, including:

Media failure

User errors (such as deleting a file by mistake)

Hardware failures (such as a damaged disk drive or permanent loss of a server)

Natural disasters

Additionally, keeping backups of data is useful for routine purposes, such as copying a database from one server to another, setting up database mirroring, archiving for governmental purposes, and disaster recovery.

Back up and restore all or part of your farm and content

The following tasks for backup and recovery are performed on databases or on sites, sub-sites, and files: